With the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the much more recent corporate scandals at MBA-laden companies, business schools have been scratching their heads about how, exactly, to fortify their ethics curricula. And with the information technology revolution radically revamping management practices, the top-ranked schools have likewise struggled with whether to require IT in the core. Then there’s the question of how to strike a better balance between the traditional number-crunching management science courses like accounting, finance, and operations management and the often-neglected soft skills like leadership and negotiations, which can make or break executives in the real world.
A version of this article appeared in the December 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.
